From Jerusalem, from the heart of Palestine, a land
besieged, and repeatedly violated by a most brutal Israeli military occupation,
I have come to join you today.From
the midst of the people of Palestine, a tortured nation, guilty only of an
unwavering commitment to freedom, dignity, and independence, I have come to join
you today. From the depths of unredeemed history, I have come to join you today.I represent a narrative of exclusion, denial, racism, and national
victimization, but I also come with a message of hope, redemption, and
historical vindication embodied in the spirit and the will of a people that has
refused to succumb to all forces of oppression, violence, cruelty, and
injustice.

In convening this conference, you are the authentic
embodiment of courage in withstanding the forces of domination, subjugation, and
enslavement.We stand together
today to launch a truly global mission ofempowerment
and solidarity, to give voice to the silenced, to give a reality to the
invisible, to give recognition to the denied, and to give credence to the
victimized.

In times of adversity, and during the darkest nights of the
soul, we look to you for affirmation and action as an antidote to the failure of
established power systems, including governmentsa failure characterized by self- interest, power politics, absence of
will, and impotence.I take this
opportunity to recognize before you those valiant men and women who had left the
comfort of their homes in Europe and the US and joined us in Palestine to
provide popular protection, a human shield in the face of Israeli abuses,
violence, and violations against the Palestinian people.

I come to you today with a heavy heart leaving behind a
nation in captivity held hostage to an ongoing Nakba
[catastrophe], as the most intricate and pervasive expression of persistent
colonialism, apartheid, racism, and
victimization.

More than half a century ago [53 years], the Palestinians
as a people were slated for national obliteration, cast outside the course of
history, their identity denied, and their very human cultural and historical
reality suppressed.We became
victims of the myth of a land without a people for people without a land whereby
the West sought to assuage its guilt over its horrendous anti-Semitism by the
total victimization of a whole nation.Zionism
sought to implement its agenda of exclusivity by usurping not only the lands and
rights of the Palestinians, but also by confiscating their utterance and
distorting their historical narrative.

In 1948, we became subject to a grave historical injustice
manifested in a dual victimization:on
the one hand, the injustice of dispossession, dispersion, and exile forcibly
enacted on the population that has come to be known as the refugee question that
currently encompasses more than 5 million Palestinians.On the other hand, those that remained were subject to the systematic
oppression and brutality of an inhuman occupation that robbed them of all their
rights and liberties including their national identity on their own land.

The creation of the state of Israel was no heroic and
legendary accomplishment as depicted by the version of history propagated by the
conquerors.It is time to lift the
veil, to examine the facts themselves, and to come to grips with the horrific
price paid by an innocent nation for the mere fact of its existence as well as
for the agreed and moral blindness of others.The days of denial must come to an end.The Palestinian people deserve their day in the sun as an equal among
nations, and as a tribute to the human will that cannot be broken. As a
Palestinian, as a woman, and on behalf of my people, I stand before you today to
lay claim to my/to our humanity.From
the non-existent Palestinians (there is not such thing as Palestinians; they
never existed (Golda Meir, 1969) we have undergone a metamorphosis willfully
inflicted upon us by Israeli-imposed diction and policies that have variously
depicted us as two-legged vermin, cockroaches, beasts walking on two legs, a
people that have to be exterminated unless they are resigned to live as slaves,
grasshoppers to be crushed, crocodiles, and vipers.[A comprehensive list with representative samples is available]

Such a systematic and racist dehumanization was also
accompanied by policies of violent expulsion.There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring
countries, not one village, not one tribe should be left (Joseph Weitz, 1940).

There is no choice: the Arabs must make room for the Jews
in Eretz Yisrael.If it was possible to transfer the Baltic peoples, it is also possible to
move the Palestinian Arabs (Vladimir Jabotinsky, 1939).

Zionist colonization must either be terminated or carried
out against the wishes of the native population. It is important to speak
Hebrew, but it is even more important to be able to shootor else I am through at playing with colonizing (Vladimir Jabotinsky,
1939).

We must do everything to insure they never return.The old will die and the young will forget.However, for those that remained in spite of all of Israels military
coercion and attempts at forced expulsion, other (and equally sinister) plans
were in the making: We shall reduce the Arab population to a community of
woodcutters and waiters.(David Ben
Gurion).

To the rest of the world, we were reduced to the
Aristotelian dualism of pity and fearthe
pitiful refugees, of the fearful terrorists.But never were we perceived or addressed in the fullness of our humanity.

The Palestinians today continue to be subject to multiple
forms and expressions of racism, exclusion, oppression, colonialism, apartheid,
and national denial. Our right to self-determination, hence sovereignty and
statehood, has been withheld by force and made subject to the approval of our
oppressor. The refugee populations, mostly stateless people, are bereft of the
rudimentary civil, human, political, and national rights, left at the mercy of
host countries that view them either as a demographic threat, or as unwelcome
guests.While Israel has legislated
a law of return to bring in Jews from all over the world into historical
Palestine, it persists in rejecting the Palestinian refugees Right of Return and
in refusing to abide by UN res. 194, a legal commitment which the international
community was supposed to guarantee and implement.

The Palestinians who remained in what has become Israel are
experiencing in their historical homeland the worst system of apartheid,
exclusion, and racial discrimination -- their towns and cities either taken over
entirely, or turned into ghettos and enclaves as the non-Jewish population of
Israel.Many continue to be
displaced persons in their own land, witnesses to the destruction of their
villages.Over 500 villages were
razed in the original ethnic cleansing campaign that accompanied the creation of
the state of Israel.Those of us
who came under Israeli occupation in 1967 have languished in the West Bank,
Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip under a unique combination of military occupation,
settler colonization, and systematic oppression.

Rarely has the human mind devised such varied, diverse, and
comprehensive means of wholesale brutalization and persecution.Since 1967, Palestinian land has been expropriated at an increasing pace,
while whole Jewish populations have been brought in, in a calculated scheme of
settler colonization.Throughout
the land, an artificial and colonial grid of infrastructure was superimposed on
our authentic reality to create a spurious settler superstructure as a means of
Israeli demographic, geographic, and extraterritorial incursions into Palestine.So-called bypass roads for the exclusive use of the illegal Jewish
settler population, tear through the heart of Palestinian land, to bypass
Palestinian realities and create a unique form of racism. In the meantime,
settler vigilantes habitually unleash the full force of their extremism and
violence,carrying out campaigns of
terror against defenseless Palestinian families and villages. Israel's state
terrorism is implemented by both military and settler perpetrators with
political duplicity and legal impunity.

Another unique manifestation of Israeli racism is the
blatant and sinister policy of demographic engineering.To maintain the Jewish character, or the purity of the state of Israel,
the Palestinians have been depicted and dealt with as a demographic threat.Proposed remedies included calls for forced birth control and population
management, to transfer and expulsion of whole communities, to the racist and
punitive unilateral separation scheme currently being advocated.

In Jerusalem, land expropriation, ID confiscations, home
demolitions, withholding of building permits, and the importation of settler
colonies within and around the city have become constant elements of Israels
demographic engineering through ethnic cleansing.

Jerusalem is also under siege in an attempt to isolate it
from its Palestinian context and environment, and to extricate it from the heart
of Palestine, as the center of political, cultural, economic, social, and
educational activity and as the future capital of our state.Such Israeli unilateral measures seek to consolidate Israels illegal
annexation of occupied Jerusalem, and to impose a Jewish exclusivity on a
Palestinian city that has always been pluralistic and tolerant.Onslaughts on Christian and Islamic holy sites and activities while
banning Palestinian worshipers from reaching their holy places of worship betray
a willful policy of intolerance and a violation of the right and freedom to
worship.

A state of siege has been imposed not only on the West
Bank and Gaza, but also within these territories, to transform each village,
town, and city into an isolated prison thereby destroying every aspect of human
life, including economic, educational, health, and social cohesiveness in an
attempt to sever every fiber of the fabric of normal life.Israeli occupation troops using tanks, helicopter gunships, F-16s,
military barges, and checkpoints not only render a whole Palestinian population
captive in 64 isolated bantustans,
they also use the full force of their military power against a vulnerable and
defenseless people.Daily, they
shell Palestinian homes, assassinate Palestinian activists and leaders, destroy
crops and fields, indulge in cold-blooded murder of children and other innocents
while implementing a policy of deliberate humiliation and suffocation at every
checkpoint.

The Israeli occupation has also hijacked the concept of
security rendering it applicable only to Israelis while depriving the
Palestinians of every aspect of personal, political, legal, territorial,
historical, cultural, economic, and even human security. As a blanket cover for
its systematic abuses, Israel has also abused the essence of the concept,
exploiting it for the sake of eradicating any mention of the occupation, and
claiming the illogical right to have a securer, even a safe and pleasant
military occupation that is in itself the very antithesis of peace, security,
and human rights.

As the world watches, Israel has succeeded in evolving
and imposing another grand deception in the form of an official spin that not
only dehumanizes and demonizes the Palestinians, but also as an attempt at
blaming the victim and resuscitating labels that represent us as subhuman
species, and genetically violent terrorists, hence undeserving of any human
treatment.At best, a false
symmetry is manufactured between occupier and occupied, oppressor and oppressed,
(as in the call on both sides to stop the violence) serving to eradicate the
full horror of the occupation while depriving the victims of their right to
resist.Given the disequilibrium of
power, the American insistence on a bilateral solution only serves to give
Israel license to exploit the asymmetry of power and to pursue its policies of
subjugating a whole nation and imposing a unilateral and unjust solution.

The Israeli solution is firmly imbedded in the tainted
mentality of occupation as license to dictate by force of arms illegal and
punitive realities that would further exacerbate the conflict and the suffering
of the Palestinian people.Refusal
to intervene by the US and the international community as a whole has given
Israel a free hand to continue to act with impunity and immunity as a country
above the law and beyond accountability, while the Palestinians continue to be
deprived of protection of the law and the minimal imperatives of moral and human
decency.We continue to plead for a
global rule of law that would check the aggression of the powerful, and
eliminate the ongoing dehumanization of the Palestinian people.Such absence of will and abrogation of responsibility on the part of the
international community has not only perpetuated the Nakba
and prolonged the suffering and victimization of the Palestinian people, but has
also served to undermine the quest and chances for peace throughout the region.

When we joined the peace process launched in Madrid in
1991, we did so as an act of will, as a commitment to a peaceful resolution of
the conflict with the aim of ending the occupation of 22% of historical
Palestine and the establishment of our independent state on the territory
occupied by Israel in 1967.As
victims, we rose above the pain of the moment and reached out to our occupiers
to wrench the course of history away from inevitable conflict, towards
reconciliation based on justice and parity.Buttressed by the confidence of the peoples will to endure and resist
oppression, as manifested in the intifada
of 1987, we offered Israel and the world a unique opportunity to legitimize a
daring pursuit of peace, and to gain a constituency for an equitable resolution.

Unfortunately, the peace process became a punitive
process manipulated by Israel to pursue its policies of expansion, ethnic
cleansing, colonialism, and subjugation of the weaker side by force.It further served as a guise to rationalize the separation of the people
from the land and to fragment both the people and the land, transforming the
occupied Palestinian territories into a series of isolated reservations or Bantustans
while maintaining full Israeli hegemony and direct control.While seeking to bestow retroactive legitimacy on illegal Israeli
settlements, and on Israels annexation of Jerusalem by force, it also sought to
negate the Palestinian refugees right of return thereby denying the very essence
of peace and destroying its foundations.

The so-called generous offer of Barak has been exposed
for the sham that it isan
occupiers version of whats good for the natives, based only on whats good for
Israel, thus ensuring further conflict and instability rather than cementing a
fair and durable solution.Having
been historically the victims of war and conflict, we found ourselves the
victims of a flawed and unjust peace process.

Sharon's incursion into the Haram
Al-Sharif on September 28, 2000, was only the calculated spark that ignited
a powder keg already in place as a result of the inequities of the process
itself.The use of live ammunition
and lethal force against the unarmed Palestinian protestors unleashed horrific
forces of hostility, racism, and orchestrated violence against the captive
Palestinian people. The continued intensification of these measures sends an
ominous and stark message of brutality and is symptomatic of the regression to
fundamentalist Zionism witnessed in the bloodbaths of the 1940s.By claiming that this is the continuation of Israel's War of
Independence, Sharon is sending a message to the Palestinian people and to the
whole world that the national eradication and the ethnic cleansing of the 1948
Nakba are still in process.

The current Israeli government represents the most lethal
combination of extremist right-wing political ideology, religious fundamentalism
and zealotry, and unbridled forces of militarism with a deceptive veneer of the
civilized face of the Labor party.Sharon
is the same army general who had committed crimes against humanity in such
atrocities as the Qibya massacre of
1953, the cleansing of Gaza in 1973, the invasion of Lebanon and the massacres
of Sabra and Shatila
of 1982.Intent on pursuing this
bloody path and on repeating the mistakes of history, Sharon has not learned
that no amount of brutality, cruelty, or violence can break the will of a people
determined to gain its freedom, dignity, and independence.He shows no signs of drawing the right historical conclusions that
colonialism is by nature a temporary form of enslavement, and that a people
colonized cannot be brought to their knees by the colonizers stifling measures
of subjugation and containment.

Sisters and brothers, I appeal to you today, to restore
the absent Palestinians to the agenda of humanity, to validate our reality and
rights, to recognize and alleviate the pain and suffering of this tortured
nation, and to give recognition to the Palestinian narrative long denied.You are the only source of empowerment for a people who feel abandoned
and disempowered, but who have never lost faith in human solidarity and a shared
vision of emancipation.

I appeal to you, as I have often done to governments and
global fora, not to adopt the stance of cowardly neutrality, for in the struggle
against oppression, injustice, racism, intolerance, colonialism, and exclusion,
there can be NO neutrality.We are
all called upon to take sides on behalf of the victim, the disenfranchised, and
the oppressed, and to stem the tide of evil and prevent the forces of darkness
from prevailing.Here, there is no
US veto to deprive us of protection and our rights, nor is there censorship or
blackmail to intimidate governments ruled by self-interest.

Let this meeting radiate the pure light of the human
spirit that can never be dimmed or contained.Our path to the future must be based on the redemption of history and the
past, free of the shackles of inherited inequities.Our legacy to the future must be based on the rectification of the
painful legacies of the past.

Never before has an occupation army imposed such a total
and suffocating siege on a captive civilian population, then proceeded to shell
their homes, bomb their infrastructure, assassinate their activists and leaders,
destroy their crops and trees, murder their civilians at will, steal their
lands, and then demand that they acquiesce like lambs to the slaughter. Never
before have the victims been denied the right to articulate, and gain
recognition for, the horrendous atrocities being committed against them as a
matter of policy, but were rather blamed and punished for the fact of their
victimization.

On behalf of the Palestinian people I appeal to you to
have the courage to intervene, to ensure that the oppressor is held accountable
and the victim is protected, to enact those principles and values that not only
protect lives but that also imbue life with the human qualities that make it
worth living. Despite our overwhelming pain, we have not surrendered to the
forces of occupation, colonization, racism, and dehumanization nor have we
adopted their moral distortions. I ask you also not to succumb, but to maintain
and enhance the struggle for dignity, equality, freedom, and justice as an act
of collective affirmation on behalf of humanity as a whole.